Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
A professional photographer for quite a few years now, I thought some of you may be interested in some photography business advice and tips through this entry-level straight forward photography business guide.
This is a general guide since there are so many ways to define a photography business.
When I was photographing eyes a few weeks ago I came across a fascinating phenomenon:
The human iris and especially blue irises produce rainbow coloured gradients under cross polarization.
What does “Cross Polarization” mean?
Cross polarization is a technique that allows us to virtually eliminate specular highlights from images by using polarized light, but it also holds a lot of creative potential, as it can be used to bring out eye-catching rainbow gradients in subjects such as plastics, ice and certain crystals.
In the industry this technique is used e.g. to locate areas of stress in plastic, but it also holds a lot of potential for interesting macro images:
While I’m a big proponent of using flash in my photography, particularly portraits, there are times when the natural light gives you everything you need without the addition of flash. And sometimes, it’s almost there, but might need a little help from a reflector or two to help wrangle the natural light to fit the look you’re after.
That last bit is the principle used here as Pye Jirsa walks us through building up a home portrait studio in a garage in under 5 minutes. It’s a setup that lets you create some great looking portraits that look like they could have been done in a large studio with a ton of fancy expensive lighting, except, it wasn’t. It was a garage.
Cross polarization is a technique that uses two polarizing filters – one on the light source and on e on the camera lens – to get rid of unwanted specular reflections.
The following slideshow illustrates the effect at varying degrees, depending on the orientation of the filters with respect to each other.
There seems to be a lot of confusion as to exactly what high and low key portraits are and the differences between them. At least, there seems to be whenever I spend some time browsing on social media. A lot of people seem to think that high key means “overexposed” and that low key means “underexposed”. But things couldn’t be further from the truth.
In this video, fashion photographer and educator Lindsay Adler walks us through the process of creating both high and low key beauty portrait looks. She explains exactly what she’s going for with each look, why, and how she’s going to achieve it.
Using coloured gels can be a little unforgiving, especially if you’re new to using strobes. But one of the biggest reasons using gels can be tricky, is due to how hard it can be to use multiple coloured gels in the same setup. Coloured lights do not play well together and unlike paint, where you can create new and wonderful colours by mixing them, mixing coloured light often results in dull, washed-out colours. Coloured gels do not mix and consequently must ordinarily be kept separate in your shot at all times.
Thankfully though, in today’s setup, I will be showing you how to mix coloured gels with incredible ease, in fact, it’s so easy, we’ll only be using one light to do it!
If you’re just getting into wedding photography, it can be a bit scary thinking of all the shots you need to take throughout the day. But worry not, John Branch IV has got your back. In this great video, he gives you ten go-to poses for photographing wedding couples. And more than that, he shares a bunch of useful tips that will make your photos even more beautiful.
It’s no secret that we use Set a Light to test our photo lighting before we start a shoot. (We talked about it here, here, and extensively here). We even used it to play around with models under lockdown. While I used the software quite a bit for photo projects done with strobes, it lacked in the cinema section. But now, they released a new version, and I am blown away by the possibilities it opened.
If you want to play, there is a trial version in this link; if you need some motivation, though, read on.
This kind of struck me as a little bit weird at first. Mostly because it was something I’d never even considered. Toning, sure, but split toning the shadows and highlights separately on a black and white image that doesn’t actually have any native colour whatsoever? Yeah, kinda weird. But the more I watched this video from photographer Anthony Morganti, the more it intrigued me.
It’s an interesting idea, to add colour to a black & white image – and not in the colourising sense, but doing the same kind of shadow and highlight tints we might typically do to a colour image or video sequence. For stills, though, in Lightroom, it’s pretty easy to do, too.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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